England

From baroque-era cathedrals to the latest postmodern structures, from prehistoric Stonehenge to Regency Bath, from one-pub Cotswold villages to London's Mod Brit restaurants, England is a spectacular tribute to the strength—and flexibility—of tradition. Here you'll find soaring medieval cathedrals; grand country mansions of the aristocracy, filled with paintings, furniture, and tapestries and set in elegantly landscaped grounds; and grim fortified castles, whose gray-stone walls held fast against all challengers. And then there's the ever-changing variety of the countryside. A day's drive from York, for example, will take you through stretches of wild, heather-covered moorland, ablaze with color in the fall; or past the steep, sheep-dotted mountainsides of the Dailes, in which isolated hamlets are scattered.